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- Instagram Tweets Through It | July 28 Issue
Instagram Tweets Through It | July 28 Issue
Meditations in a social media comms crisis
What a week?
This past week, like most weeks on the internet, has been a weird one. Platform update news feels a little slower–excluding the clusterfuck happening at Meta (see below)–but the discourse has been discoursing. If your feeds are anything like mine, you’ve been told we will all soon get Monekypox just from thinking about the towels of an infected person or that only the most extreme PNP pass-around party bottom gays are at risk. You might have even seen a sleep doctor tell you to bleach your poops (I won’t link to it, but trust me).
So I’d like all of us to take a deep breath and remember that social media is not a good vehicle for health news. Please check the credibility of your sources, especially if you are going to repost something. If you are at risk, please consider getting a monkeypox vaccine if it’s available and safe for you to do so. Spend some time looking into what behavior changes you can make to reduce your risk. Be thoughtful and kind with how you discuss this illness. Shit’s scary out there, but we can get through this and keep each other safe.
Okay, now for the links.
Platform Updates
Oh boy, but ultimately Instagram walks back its changes 🚨
The Rest of Meta
TikTok
YouTube
Twitch
Culture Movers
Film TV & Comics
Music
Tweeting Through It
It’s been A WEEK for Instagram. They launched some tests. People hated them. They walked it back. Sending a big virtual hug to everyone on the Instagram comms team; I’m sure this week has been rough. Other folks have already done great work breaking down how Meta got to this position and what that could mean for Instagram’s future (please check out Casey Newton’s Platformer and Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day), so I won’t focus on that. Instead, I want to get into how this played out on Twitter: Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram Tweeting Through It.
For those of you blessed to be less Very Online™️ than me, “tweeting through it” is a phenomenon observed with celebs, brands, influencers, or whoever happens to be the main character of the day keeps tweeting when they clearly need to log off. I’ve been at the center of a few very bad days on Twitter during my career as a social & brand marketer. There’ve been times where I kept tweeting when the brand account probably should have chilled out. I’ve learned about the virtues of logging off the hard way. So I want to offer a few points of advice for managing crisis and incident comms on Twitter to help you avoid Tweeting Through It syndrome.
Twitter incentives bad faith conversation. Like it or not, every reply you send or receive on Twitter isn’t part of a 1:1 conversation. It’s a public performance. Even good, otherwise well-intentioned people can fall for tweeting the thing that will get the most sympathy/engagement from the perceived audience over saying the thing that best communicates their point of view. Add to that the very limited space you have to make any point and the ability for in-group references to get stripped of context as the audience gets bigger and things get messy fast. When things get heated in the replies, assume everyone, even people who would otherwise be normal pleasant friends could make things worse.
Centralize your source of truth. It might seem like a good idea to go into the replies and address each person’s individual concern or misunderstanding, but with 280 characters, you are bound to underexplain yourself. Create a source of truth–a blog post, YouTube video, press interview–you can point to for the full story, and make sure you point people back to it whenever possible.
People talking to you is different that people talking about you. Just because a conversation is public and about you or your brand doesn’t mean you were invited into it. People using Twitter to vent about your product update without @ mentioning you probably don’t want to hear from you directly. Name searching is a normal part of brand health monitoring, but it’s high-key creepy for normals to do it. Especially when replying to accounts with small followings, you can actually end up putting more sunlight on the specifics of their complaint and clarifying nothing. Plus, once they get your attention, the weird dynamics I point out in Point One kick in. Just use that listening data to inform what you put in your source of truth.
Think about the people doing the work. Your social media team, community managers, and PR folks are going to have to read some really emotionally charged messages when any kind of incident occurs. We’re pros, but that shit is mentally taxing. Make sure you are checking in with them, encouraging breaks, and being clear about the kind of updates you expect when so they can do their best work. And please encourage folks to take extra time off work to compensate for any overtime they do to manage a crisis. Be direct. If you have to call an incident meeting on a Saturday, say very clearly that you expect folks to schedule extra time off after the incident is over to recharge.
I hope none of you ever have to do crisis comms for a brand (ask my partners how bad it can be), but hopefully, this advice helps if you are ever cursed by the Bird App Gods, and you’ll avoid pissing off Chrissy Tiegen.
Thank you!
Okay wow. I started this newsletter part as something to keep me occupied while I job hunt and part as a forcing function to keep myself reading this news and writing. I’m so grateful for the response I’ve received so far. I honestly expected at most five people to subscribe. There are already over 30 of you, including a few who have paid for subscriptions. You have no idea what your support means to me. Thank you!